Sunday, November 1, 2015

NACTO held its annual conference in Austin, TX. Austin is a good city with the potential to be great. The National Association of City Transportation Officials meeting was a great chance to learn about updates from many of the NACTO member cities and industry leaders.

Austin has spent a lot of effort making connections for multimodal travel in the past 10 years.

The meeting set a record for attendance (650!) and included many of the leading voices in multimodal transportation. I spent a lot of time with notes on Twitter, so if you want to review more you can look back in my timeline. I find Twitter useful for sharing and learning more about what others are thinking. In fact, I learned about "The New Social Learning" this past week.

NACTO offers a chance for cities to share ideas. These include big picture policy ideas and design details such as what an engineer needs to know to get a facility built. The Commissioner panel and keynote speeches were fantastic for providing the big picture guidance.

Global Street Design Guide: A New Approach to Street Design

Janette Sadik-Khan kicked off the conference with a keynote on advancing transportation policies and a preview of the Global Street Design Guide, NACTO's latest project. This latest initiative will incorporate guidance from the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Urban Street Design Guide, and other documents into a document that represents international best practices. The most interesting concept from the preview included an emphasis on desired outcomes such as health and safety with a focus on users and context.

Great quote from LADOT GM.

The presentation was followed by a pecha kucha session that included former APBP Board Member Seleta Reynolds who is General Manager of LADOT, Robin Hutchinson, who the Director of Salt Lake City Transportation, and Ryan Russo, Deputy Commissioner of NYCDOT. The pecha kucha session challenges presenters to offer quick thoughts in a fast paced way that keeps attention of the audience. It's something that I hope to see more of in the future because of the excitement created by the quick pace.

One of the best parts of most conferences are the technical tours in cities that afford an opportunity to learn about the implementation of innovative projects from the practitioners responsible for the project. In Austin, we had a chance to visit their downtown protected bike lanes, the City's Traffic Signal Shop and Operations Center, and many other facilities. The City of Austin have completed some fantastic projects that are advancing walking and cycling in a traditionally car oriented community. The protected bike lanes on the ground in Austin have evolved since my last visit to Austin, two and a half years ago. During that visit, I learned about the detector confirmation light which was using an "off the shelf device" for greater purposes. The City of Austin still hasn't installed a bicycle signal stencil like we have in Portland (map at the link), but they have several projects that have made cycling better in the City.

My main takeaways from this visit were not signal related. Although, City employees have done some very interesting work in deploying an ap developed by Kimley Horn that can use data from mobile phones within the traffic signal system. The data transmitted from the phone is a Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) prototype that may be used for detection of people on bicycles (although it could be used by people in cars as well).

The most important reason to attend the conference is to put faces with the names and exchange ideas.

Nathan Wilkes shares knowledge with attendees.

Ideas that are "traded" City to City save the public money. Take for instance the Urban Bikeway Design Guide. The City of Portland doesn't need to reinvent the wheel and develop a "Portland specific Guide", we can use NACTO's version. If we need more information, we can also call our colleagues as opposed to using consultants for every detail. (No offense to my consultant friends). The example of curb types for protected bike lanes is one such example. I was impressed with the City of Austin's abilities to implement curbs on some on-street sections where it would have been easier to leave separation and transition to either shared space or a more traditional bicycle lane. As Nathan Wilkes, our tour guide said, "the City did a lot of outreach in order to insure that the protected lane was preserved for the entire length of the street".